Meeting the English is Kate Clanchy's first novel, but its polish is a reminder that she has 20 years of award-winning poetry behind her. Even the title is freighted with irony. Meeting the English turns out to be a far more slippery business than 17-year-old Struan Robertson imagines, when he arrives in London's Hampstead in 1989. Struan is a Scot, a gifted young man experienced beyond his years in the ways of suffering. He has cared for his father until his death from multiple sclerosis, and worked for two years in an old people's home while studying for Highers. Struan is clearly the ideal person to take the job as live-in carer for the playwright Philip Prys, who has been felled by a stroke.

In Hampstead, Struan's own preconceptions are confounded, just as he confounds the lazy thinking of the household where he now finds himself ravenously eating Pot Noodles and trying to communicate with Philip by means of blinks. For a start, there are few English about: instead, there are Londoners. Philip has left the Welsh Valleys forever on the strength of his play The Pit and Its Men. His first wife, Myfanwy, is equally Welsh and equally unlikely to venture beyond the North Circular. Giles, Philip's literary agent, wears the linguistic clothing of a certain type of Englishman – he is "most frightfully sorry", and his family are "my people" – but, as he tells Struan late in the story, he is Dutch by birth and came to England at 16, as a Jewish refugee. What Giles finds "absolutely terrific" about London is that "no one cares here, no one notices". Philip's present wife, Shirin, is also a refugee, this time from Iran. Young and beautiful, she paints miniatures, enchants Struan, and teaches him about the ruthlessness of survival.

Kate Clanchy's memoir, Antigona and Me, was a forceful study of her own relationship with a Kosovan refugee neighbour. Could one woman brought up in liberal traditions and economic ease come to understand another brought up in a code of blood feuds and honour killings? Only, perhaps, by the laying aside of a self hedged by preconceptions. Meeting the English, too, concentrates on what it takes to overcome the barriers of difference and truly know another person. Uncertainty, fear, dissimulation and layerings of identity permeate the novel. With wit and zest, Clanchy creates social comedy out of teeth-clenching situations. Struan is wary and watchful. He knows that he is poor and has gone nowhere. He is gauche, self-righteous and yet worldly too, full of a furious capacity which will come into its own as soon as he has got the measure of Hampstead. Philip has lost the power of self-determination that Struan is about to gain: he cannot speak and can barely move a muscle. Inside his own head he struggles to gather the threads of who he is. He lives on the brink of terror, and in this Clanchy creates a subtle affinity between the disabled husband and his beautiful trophy wife.

People who have been terrorised do not always present themselves with candour, and why should they? Shirin's elegant, perfectly controlled surface belies the chaos of her early experience. She has had to steal from her own grandmother in order to get her family out of Iran. She may marry for security, or plunder her stepchildren's trust fund, without feeling that she violates her own code.

These are serious subjects, but this is in no sense a solemn book. Clanchy's trenchant, often very funny prose also shimmers with sensual pleasures. Every day is soaked in summer's sweaty, sexy heat. Characters fall in love, or what they mistake for love, with Shakespearean recklessness. There is a kind of enchantment in their couplings, as if they too have had juice put on their eyelids, and they reveal strange gifts. Fat Juliet, Philip's daughter, sheds her flesh and becomes hard, lovely and purposeful. Struan's former English teacher, seemingly a born loser, trumpets back to an elephant in the Zoo "with such uncanny similitude that you'd think he'd been imitating elephants all his days". Lanky, freckly Struan turns golden and full of muscle.

In the end there are few English to be met. They have slipped away, perhaps, disguising themselves, shrugging off the cloak of identity that others such as Giles want to wear. Hampstead, as Struan finds it, is a stage that needs players. He comes to observe, he stays to be transformed and to discover that there was a role for him all the time. Meeting the English is a richly conceived, original and very entertaining novel.